Their Own Devices

Mission 08

DIabolical traps, fiendish minions, and the A.T.A.

5

MAY/14

After stomping their way up the first stretch of corridor, the prospective field agents find themselves waiting for a cloud of tear gas to clear before they continue around the corner.

They proceed carefully, first peering around the corner to ascertain that they are approaching a further set of two turrets, and what looks like two more pop up mines directly between them and the first turret.
By the turrets the corridor appears to become wider, recessing away from the inner wall of the arena.

They decide that the first step is to remove the turret, and gamely step out to engage it in a fire fight. The turret is destroyed by several bursts of sub machinegun fire.

KD moves up to dive onto the first popup mine, hoping that by stopping them reaching their full extension they can be prevented from exploding. The rocket burst that sends the mine out gives him a nice solid thwack in the gut for his efforts, but he’s successful in preventing the mine exploding.

Unfortunately he’s accidentally thrown himself into range of the far turret, and it proceeds to fire a bean bag round at him from its integral shotgun, which glances off the wall as he dives for cover. The rest of the team move up to fire at the turret, but don’t successfully destroy it until after it has fired again, giving KD a second horrendous bruise across his stomach, but no lasting damage.

After dispatching the turret, the squad moves up to investigate the widening of the corridor. It appears to lead into a broad passageway that is completely floored by what appears to be a very large version of the electrified flooring that they had encountered earlier in the arena. Investigating closely shows that the trip wire for this grate is not conveniently at the front, but placed 3 metres in from the nearest edge, out of reach of easy access.

The wire is, however, still at 4 feet from the floor. KD crawls across the grate quietly to see what can be seen on the far side. As he does, some combination of pressure and previously invisible lasers trigger the floor, causing it to electrify just as KD reaches the far side. To add to the pleasure of the experience, he hears the tell tale kerchunking sound of more bot cupboards opening within the chamber he’s just reached.

The swarm of bots that moves towards them is efficiently dispatched by the squad working in concert, mp7s happily tearing through the thing force field that the bots are using. Freddie has concluded from his examination of the remains that the bots use radio to communicate – and possibly to receive orders. He decides to attempt jamming their comms, using the radio equipment from the remains of the bots and the power sources within the charging cupboards. He succeeds in jamming one frequency that they are using, but detects another active. Jamming one causes half the attacking bots to stop reacting to changes in their environment – they don’t seem to be receiving new orders while the jamming is active.
Several bots walk onto the still active electric grates and die pathetically.

After the room is cleared, Freddie and Penfold decide to use their new haul of bot corpses to set up more relays to jam more frequencies simultaneously, hopefully shutting down the bots entirely.

Wils, Aaron, and KD move up the hall, and accidentally trigger another, even larger swarm of bots while disarming a tether mine. Aaron lays down suppressing fire, eliminating more than half the bots in his first burst. However, a lucky shot from a bot who narrowly missed being cut down by the wall of 7.62mm hits Aaron in the face, and he’s knocked out cold before he can continue mowing down the bots.

KD and Wils comfortably handle the remainder of the swarm, and Freddie and Penfold‘s jamming assists in causing some of the bots to kill themselves, while others don’t move beyond just outside their storage cupboards and can be dispatched without threat.

After Freddie comes up and revives Aaron, who doesn’t seem to have taken any long term injuries other than a mild burn across his face, the team moves on to sweep and clear the next corridor.

Using Freddie’s active jamming to disable more and more bots, Pembroke isolates and records the activation signal that is received when the squad first moves into their watch area. By playing back this snippet, Pembroke succeeds in causing some of the bots to withdraw from combat and lock themselves back in their cupboard, which combined with continued jamming neutralizes them neatly.

Finally, at the end of the fourth corridor, there is a door turning inwards, to the inner area of the arena. The squad starts to explore around the edges, while Penfold hangs back in the last explored bot room to provide bot-jamming. The room appears to be symmetrical, with metal walls around the outside to provide a clear run outside of the field of fire, and thin concrete walls and large pillars studded throughout the main area of the room.

The very centre appears to be a closed box surrounded by turrets and more bot cupboards. They guess that the pattern is symmetrical from what they can see at the starting corner, and can deduce the layout of the remainder of the room from there.
The squad proceeds to engage the bots and turrets, and don’t take any significant damage. A water cannon turret lays a broad puddle on the floor that turns into an electrical field when a taser bot is shot down on the edges of it, and the growth of the puddle takes out a few more bots that had been nearby.